I should admit that I’m not really involved in puppy for quite some time now but I couldn’t help but notice a stagnation in the "final" release of new puppies.
By now “official” puppies according to distowatch are 33 (Tahr) and 22 (slacko) months old (ie dead for the linux world) or according to puppylinux.com 18 (tahr) and 13 (slacko) months old (ie in a coma)
In the mean time XenialPup (beta) development path in ibiblio, shows 7.0.8.1/2017-Mar-10 and 7.0.8.5/2017-Apr-07 releases, while Slacko-7 (beta/rc) path shows, 6.9.6.7/2017-May-14, 6.9.9.6/2017-Jun-03 and 6.9.9.8/2017-Jun-07.
Debian/Devuan, although discussed a lot, has no build present in ibiblio.org/puppylinux yet.
On the other hand, woof-CE code in the testing branch, where the current puppies are build from, keeps evolving to the point that XenialPup is an alpha by now and slacko is probably back to beta, pushing releases further away.

It is clear that puppylinux after BK, does not have any full time developer/builder to push things forward in a constant speed. Woof-CE can effectively pick the development load but does very little in the release front. Currently the Xenial/Slacko builders appear occupied by real life and whoever builds in private is not interested to release (and support) any puppies or maybe (s)he does not want to step on the toes of the current builders.
In case the second is true, I would suggest it is time puppylinux to follow the FatDog example, where an OS is released by 2 (or more) persons, so when one is busy it can go on with the other(s). This however, requires an open invitation by the current developers of the xenial/slacko(/debian?) puppies to potential builders that might want to pickup the current building slack and of course to express the willingness to cooperate (which I believe they have).
I would think/hope that this might bring puppy releases back on truck.
Unless if, as many pundits in this forum claim, puppylinux has indeed closed its circle and is time to move on.

Edit: Moderators, I believe that the title of my thread was changed!
I changed it back to "Puppy releases". Please leave it that way!
The point is the thread is a call for build/release process by more than one person per puppy. NOT the frequency of puppy builds. The frequency of the data/comments is just the "justification" for the said call._________________== Here is how to solve yourLinux problems fast ==Last edited by mavrothal on Wed 02 Aug 2017, 06:49; edited 2 times in total

I should admit that I’m not really involved in puppy for quite some time now....

It is clear that puppylinux after BK, does not have any full time developer/builder to push things forward....

I would suggest it is time puppylinux to follow the FatDog example, where an OS is released by 2 (or more) persons, so when one is busy it can go on with the other(s)..

Hi Mavrothal,

Did the irony of what you wrote (highlighted above) not hit you between the eyes? You summarily put the nail in the wood, picked up the hammer, place your thumb directly on top of the nail, and swung the hammer And I mean this with all the respect you richly deserve (as you're one of our gurus here, and we can't afford to lose anymore such as you)

You remember Porteus, before how it is now in its recent form (where it's regressed to doing what has happened here in puppyland)? Going to Porteus' old homepage, it was a beautiful one page layout that greeted you with simple "build & customize" layout that let you completely build the OS of your choice, with what you wanted in it, and it happened right there and you could download your build in short order. The thrill was incredible. It was tangible. And even a novice could understand how to choose OS-bit type, the desktop choice, to what they wanted in it (within reason), to time/date/etc simple configs, to browser choice, to email client choice, chat, etc, and a few other thingss. It was seductive. It was wonderful. It showed a glimpse of a future that "could be". Remember that?

In my honest opinion, this is what Woof-CE has the potential to achieve. Our greatest strength, the absolute uncontrolled diversity of different pups and pup-related distros, is also our greatest weakness, and it is the very thing causing, as you wrote, the stagnation (possibly a bit too strong a word to describe things). Currently, regarding woof-CE, the problem is it seems it has only really been jilst, doing way too much, trying to keep the whole thing together. A few of the builders, like micko, also try to keep their respective woof-CE builds up-to-date & working. But there needs and should be so much more. The future is here in this path forward. Thus, my opinion is the "push" should be here, at woof-CE, and not on individual releases anymore.

Billtoo, and Sailor, two of the overall user-side of woof-CE build virtuosos I've learned from, are the shining examples of what Woof-CE could become. I mean, they made me into a builder, using the Woof-CE process. Imagine what would happen in puppyland if the Woof-CE process was brought to the level of what the old Porteus home build page used to be, where anyone could show up at Porteus and feel INCREDIBLE as their custom-build was made. Imagine a Woof-Ce singular home page, and do a build all by just clicking their mouse. Just imagine what this could become. And the flowering it would unleash.

The constant refrain I hear from friends, when I turn them on to puppy, whether it is a pup and/or pup-related build, is that they get lost & overwhelmed at the wildness of choices. It is "not" that a builder disappears and/or moves on with their life, it is the overwhelming feeling of these choices. It turns them off, quickly. As hard as it is to understand, let alone accept, we humans struggle we presented with a wild orgy of choices. Wild gobs of choices are great for those that enter the food-pit to eat (a metaphor describing us regulars here), but as it stands now these gobs of choices are a massive turn-off for all and anyone else.

You know, there is currently a puppy-murga-land killer out there, and it is called Sparky-Linux. They are clearly a puppy-wannabe, but they are going the route of offering many different looking DE builds & choices within based off of singular custom build base(s) that the user-builder will eventually control & choose. They are soon, it is rumored, going to be tinkering with what Porteus used to do with that old hompe page build style. If this happens, murga here will fall even more precipitously off the map than it already is. Thus, iImagine if Woof-CE, now, did this, giving the user the thrill, satisfaction, incipient curiousity satiated, of clicking through & doing a custom-build themselves. Again, I say, if this happened, murga & puppy-verse would experience a new bursting-forth, a new explosion, and the beautiful thing is the whole process would keep reinforcing itself. And for any claims that this approach would kill off individuality and expression and such, then the point is being missed. The wildness of expression, individuality, and such, could be expressed INSIDE woof-CE IF that person puts his/her choices inside the build process. Something that is easily done, yet it all is corralled, focused, and made "simply sexy" by the porteus-build like approach of the new woof-CE.

One of the items not mentioned in the above discussion is the kernel . This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of distro-building. Consider that a rather small enclave of users still use 32-bit, many use 64-bit, some are using risc processing, and some are using "proprietary" builds. Theres UEFI everywhere except for the small enclave of 32-bit users.

The driver list has become ginormous, trying to satisfy all end-users. And again theres proprietary workarounds. IMHO almost every new end-product comes with a decidedly unique set of drivers. This simply bloats a "universal" kernel. At some point, thers going to be a need to split the kernel according to general usage (say 64-bit and RISC) because the diversity no longer overlaps. IIRC theres i586 (pae/non-pae), i64, AMD_64, and RISC compatability. Figuring what can be removed is not a superficial task. /MHO

Before we get there, lets consider the large field of diversity. It was simpler years back, because the computing world was simpler.

Regards
8Geee_________________Linux user #498913

Good God!, by the stars in the sky we are lost!
And into the breach we got tossed!
And the world is comin' on fast! --Florence Welch

... with but a few clicks of the mouse, you'll have ya' a small, fully functional Porteus-boot/save Debian Stretch .iso. Create a "Puppyfying mega pack" .deb (and/or repo) that includes a full selection of the outstanding and unique Puppy apps from the likes of SFR, Ziggy, Micko, Mav, Radky, Geoffrey, rcsn51, Barry, Don, et all... BINGO! A largely self-maintaining (via Debian's native apt/Synaptic mechanism) Puppy - ready to rock.

Let us end-users modify/tweak and remaster spins to our heart's desire, and throw 'em up here on the forum as derivatives, for all the world to use. Have peebee, rg66 and Geoffrey work their incomparable magic on Lxde and Xfce spins. BAM!

Just a thought... one that appears to bypass a great deal of the complexity in understanding, maintaining and building via the Woof-CE route. That, to me, seems as if it could be a huge step in assuring Puppy's sustainability, flexibility and viability moving forward. It potentially eliminates a great deal of the time and effort that our few leading devs simply can't keep up with on their own (nor should these good folks have to!), and ultimately led to the reason behind this very thread.

« Je crois qu'il est grand temps que tu fasses une [é]dition publique. »
Transl.:"I believe it is high time that you do a public edition."

Wait a minute. If I publish a final DpupStretch-7_fr based(word added)
on a Woof-CE that says DPupStretch-7 is still in "alpha1" stage, I'll be the
laughing stock of the entire Linux world.

So please, if one of Puppy's Superior Powers could bring the DPupStretch-
7 to "release" status, it would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not taking flak for something that's not my fault.

If DPupStretch-7 achieves release status and I do publish a French variant,
I'm sure pelo will find another reason to give me flak, but that's another
matter entirely!

~~~~~~~~~

Another thought about DPupStretch-7. We had a Puppy "stretch" ready to
go before Debian had its own Stretch out. We could have pulled the rug
underneath them if we had played our cards right. Now we've lost that
momentum, and it's entirely our fault.

« Je crois qu'il est grand temps que tu fasses une [é]dition publique. »
Transl.:"I believe it is high time that you do a public edition."

LOL

Musher, I feel like it is almost a "rite of passage" thing, almost like a religious experience, to be attacked & villified by the great Oracle of Paris Pelo (aka O.P.P.). Many months back, O.P.P. ripped me & my released version of Dpup-Stretch quite royally, scolding me up & down like I was a school kid who just got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

So, in my eyes, it's part of the grand ceremony here: you do not make it into the upper Pantheon of Murga Island unless O.P.P. has imparted upon you the rites of passage. I almost cried tears of joy when the great Oracle himself deigned to respond in my poor little dpup-stretch release thread and without so much as a "hello", began his pronouncements telling me how so close to the devil it & I had become. It still gives me goosebumps, remembering waking up that day & seeing the imprimatur of the Holy O.P.P. gracing my thread.

Hi belham !
Looks like your suffering in the "Dark Night of the Soul " was not in vain.
For me as an interested "Passenger" it is always a pleasure to read your humorous ,entertaining and intelligent suggestion.....a bit kick-ass seems to work .

...
The constant refrain I hear from friends, when I turn them on to puppy, whether it is a pup and/or pup-related build, is that they get lost & overwhelmed at the wildness of choices. It is "not" that a builder disappears and/or moves on with their life, it is the overwhelming feeling of these choices. It turns them off, quickly. As hard as it is to understand, let alone accept, we humans struggle we presented with a wild orgy of choices. Wild gobs of choices are great for those that enter the food-pit to eat (a metaphor describing us regulars here), but as it stands now these gobs of choices are a massive turn-off for all and anyone else.
...

To me, this is the main issue with current state of Puppy: too much fragmentation.
Not just too many choices, but without the creator BK's leadership, lack of *official* choices.
There are many fine developers and I'm sure most are good people. But myself and others just don't really want to run "some random guy's distro spin."

That's not meant as an insult, but partly for security reasons. An official release with a large following and user base will have lots of bug testing and feature testing. A lone spin, which may be great and all that, will be missing out on all that testing. People don't want to trust their system to some untrusted perpetual alpha product.

As for the current state, I just saw that the mainline UPup developer has moved on? And the SPup release has slowed down. I like SPup, but Slackware is falling. UPup will always be a good choice, but Debian seems to be gaining favor and would be really nice to see an official DPup release. Otherwise Puppy will continue to drop in Distrowatch rankings.

And then there are the Dogs. Seems to be more activity on the Dog side, at least on the forums. That also adds to confusion for new users coming to the forums, need some distinction between Puppy and Dog distros. But the Dogs don't have the following and user base to match the bug and feature testing that Puppy once had.. It could be, but again need to reduce choices, come up with a main Dog release, with different desktop options, but not treated as even more distro choices.

The captain of the Puppy ship (as I understand) is suppose to be 01micko.

I know he cannot do this as a full time job (as Barry K. did)
He has a full time paying job!

So, Puppy is what it is.

Does anyone really know what or if Puppy has now a organization structure of any kind?
Other people with responsibility to help 01micko handle some of these issues you talk about here?

I know there is a loose Woof CE membership for working on Woof CE._________________I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected

I know that this forum is mostly a "watering hole" where (the most vocal) people comment (on what ever is in their mind and) usually off-topic, but this is what defines puppy forum as "very friendly forum". So is fine.
However let me try to restate the point i tried to raise as I'm afraid is lost in the "noise".
This is not about puppy organisation ( ), puppy build system ( ), if puppy should become something else ( ) and the other "usual" commends that appear in this forum given the (remote) opportunity (or without it ).

It is about the Puppy release process hampered by the "real life" of the developers and specifically about
a) the existing puppy builders (mainly @666philb, @01micko and maybe @jlst) to "officially invite" help in building and releasing S/U/Dpuppy 7+ and
b) people that already building woof-ce puppies in private, to come forward, contact the said developers and release the said puppy together (a la kirk/jamesbond).

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